


Where do you go?

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Hallucinations, M/M, Post-Series, boyd is dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 19:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3145106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know, your daddy would talk to Helen after she passed," Boyd's ghost says.  "Must run in the family.".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where do you go?

Boyd is standing by the gurney as they roll away his body. He looks just the same as he had three hours ago, when Raylan shot him. Same businessman vest, same black powder on his hands, same knowing smile.

_You're here to kill me_ , he'd said.

Now, he says nothing. There is a blossom of red at his heart. Raylan hadn't missed this time.

_I fucking killed you_ , Raylan thinks as he stares. _Oh God_.

He turns away and vomits into the bushes. His hands shake. He clamps his mouth tightly shut. He won't cry out for Boyd fucking Crowder. Not here. Not ever.

Rachel's hand is on his back and he jerks away. She watches him like he's a cornered cat. 

"Let the paramedics look at you," she tells him.

"I'm fine," he growls.

She lets him go.

 

"You know, your daddy would talk to Helen after she passed," Boyd's ghost says the first time Raylan hears him speak. "He did that a lot." He smiles and Raylan's gaze is caught by his wide, white teeth. He'd been trying not to look at him.

_I'm not talking to you_ , Raylan thinks resolutely. He stares down at the clothes he's packed in his sad little bag. He's not taking anything else. He got Boyd, got the transfer, and now he's gone.

"Must run in the family," he hears Boyd say lightly, like it's green eyes or big feet.

Raylan turns to him, angry, but sits down on the bed when he realizes he's no longer wearing the clothes he died in. He's wearing the black shirt and brown pants he'd had on the day Raylan met him again, saw him in that church, found out what he'd become.

"'Member what runs in my family?" Boyd asks him.

Raylan'd heard him say it enough when they were young, repeating the words of his father like a proud little parrot.

"Ambition and an early death," Raylan replies. Sometimes he'd say "violent" instead of "early". Raylan would tell him to shut up.

He shakes his head. He doesn't want this.

"I ain't mad, Raylan," Boyd tells him softly.

Raylan closes his eyes. No tears for Boyd Crowder. None.

He feels a brush of cool wind against his cheek in the still room. When he opens his eyes, Boyd is gone.

"Fuck you," Raylan mutters after him.

 

Raylan does not nearly drop the baby when he sees Boyd in the nursery. He doesn't.

He hugs Willa more tightly to his shoulder, turning so that she can't see him, while Raylan scrutinizes him carefully.

He's sitting on the floor, back pushed up against the corner like someone put him in a time out. He looks almost young enough for that too. His hair's long and his face has got some acne. His eyes are wide, but not innocent. Never that. His arms are nothing but scratches. This is him the summer Bo had him clearing out the back acre--punishment for some transgression he'd never own up to.

"You doin' this to make me feel bad?" Raylan finds himself asking. 

The baby wiggles in his arms and burbles. Boyd is watching her like he's not quite sure how she exists. "I think I wanted something like that," Boyd says. "With Ava. It's hard to recall, me being this way right now. Not so clear."

"Why are you that way?" Raylan almost can't stand to look at him. He was so young then. Raylan wants to separate them, the boy and the man. He can't live with it otherwise.

Boyd shrugs, looking down. "Get stuck in a memory, I guess." Every moment he sounds more like the boy. Raylan feels sick. "I wanted to see her. Didn't want to wait."

These are the first moments Raylan's had alone with his girl since he'd arrived. Winona is down the hall taking a nap.

Boyd looks up at him through short, blond lashes. Still so young. "Didn't mean to mess with your head or whatever."

Even when Boyd was at his least articulate, when he was still trying to conform to his father's view of the world, of how he should be, he was whip-fucking-smart. He could read everybody else like a book.

"I don't want you to feel bad, Raylan. I just..." He doesn't seem to know. He shrugs again. "Ask me next time. I c'n barely think of it now." His eyes, bolder now, fall on the baby again. "Wish I could hold her," he says wistfully. 

"What was the memory?" 

Raylan immediately regrets asking, but Boyd breaks out into a winning smile, joyful really, and Raylan suddenly knows.

"County Fair," they say together. 

Boyd turned sixteen at the beginning of the summer and Raylan at the end. Smack in the middle, on the Fourth of July, they poured whiskey into large cokes and rode the Ferris Wheel until they couldn't see anything but blurred carnival lights and the stars in the sky.

They'd been with other boys that night, but Raylan only remembers Boyd's particular face, lit up like it is now, and his cracking voice saying in wonder, "You think this is what goin' up to the moon feels like?"

They stare at each other until the baby fusses and Raylan turns to put her down. When he turns back, Boyd is gone.

Raylan sits on the bed and puts his head in his hands.

 

"Where do you go?" Raylan asks.

They are alone in his office in Miami. It's late at night on a weekend Winona has taken Willa to see her mother in Palm Beach. He's clocking in some desk hours now so he can spend the day with the baby on Monday.

Boyd shrugs. He's wearing his coal miner's coveralls and a coat Raylan's pretty sure Ava gave him. This is the Boyd Raylan had thought he could live with. The one who wanted out, who wanted to be left alone. Sure he was sad as shit, ground into the dirt and hurting for it. But he was going straight and he still had himself, his brain, his mouth. And he still had his life.

"You know, I know what's in your mind, Raylan," he says quietly.

"That 'cause you're a figment of it, Boyd?"

He shrugs again.

"The world didn't want me to be this man." Boyd meets his eyes now. His hands are thrust in his pockets and he's leaning up against the desk opposite Raylan's.  
"I don't think you wanted to be that man very much either. Didn't take you long to fall of the wagon."

Boyd scowls and shakes his head. "That's not what it was. You know that pressure. You know Harlan."

"Yeah, but I never bowed to it. Not like you did. Every. Single. Time."

Boyd looks away. It's clear he doesn't agree. They never saw eye to eye on this. "I'm not here to argue with you, Raylan."

"So you're not here to scare me, guilt me, or argue with me. What the hell are you here for?" Raylan feels something desperate pushing up in his chest. He can't stand to look at Boyd another second, but he doesn't want to look away either. What if he's gone? What if it's the last time?

He doesn't know why it should matter.

"No, you know why it matters, Raylan. You just don't want it to."

"Say what you want," Raylan demands. He won't have this conversation with Boyd. He won't cry. Not now. No matter how much the pressure in his chest burns him.

"Does a figment want?"

Raylan sits back. "You never said that's what you are."

Boyd shrugs again. His eyes are steady on Raylan again and Raylan can't remember if they were ever so black in life. Boyd says, "Honestly, I don't know."

The Boyd Raylan remembers would never say that unless it was an absolute lie or a certain truth.

Boyd smiles. It's soft and sad and doesn't show too many of his teeth. "I feel like myself and I think when I'm not here with you. But I don't know where that is or why. I remember the times when you weren't around, Raylan, but I can't go back to them like this or the other times. I thought I might show you the Army grunt. He was real angry and real scared and I wanted you to see him. But he fades away when I think too hard on him and I can't slip him on like I did this coal miner's coat."

He's never said so much before. Raylan's head is aching with it and he can hardly look at him anymore.

"I'm sorry, Raylan, but you asked."

"Yeah," Raylan mumbles. He's feeling a little woozy. "That's weird, Boyd."

There's a noise at the door and Raylan jerks forward, straight-backed in his office chair, as Dan Grant walks in. Raylan looks towards Boyd but he's gone now.

"Hey, did you have your phone on speaker just now?" Dan asks, absently looking around. "I heard voices."

Raylan throws up in his trash can.

 

Raylan doesn't think he's bleeding out.

He's pretty sure he's not. At least not yet. The dispatcher told him emergency vehicles where two minutes behind the backup he'd called for. But the backup could be anywhere between ten and twenty minutes out from this shit hole in the middle of the swamp and Raylan's guessing at least a few of those minutes are going to make a difference.

"'Member that bandage job I did on your hands after the cave in?" Boyd asks.

He's right next to Raylan, coal-smudged face letting his eyes and teeth practically glow in the moonlight.

"How long ago was that for you?" Raylan grunts. Shit, his shoulder is killing him.

Boyd grins. "Few days." His grin falters just a little. "And a real long time too."

Raylan lets a bunch of air out of his lungs in something like a groan. "That weird?" His words are clipped with pain, but he keeps his eyes open and on Boyd.

"Not really," Boyd replies. "I done this a few times now."

"I remember." Raylan winces, clutching at his shoulder. He's tied a tourniquet and got his coat around the wound, but his grip is slipping and it fucking hurts.

"You can close your eyes, Raylan," Boyd says softly. "I ain't going anywhere right now."

Raylan closes his eyes, sighing. "You here to answer my question 'fore I bleed out next to my car?"

Boyd snorts. "You don't really think you're gonna bleed out."

"Might just be in denial."

"You ain't even lightheaded yet."

"This all might be a coma dream. Maybe I lost too much blood. Maybe they're about to pull the plug and Winona's cursing my name leaving her alone with my child."

"Don't be so dramatic. I ain't no angel or devil on your shoulder. I ain't no Clarence Oddbody here to show you what there's to live for. I just--"

Raylan opens his eyes and looks at Boyd. He looks real young, but there's a hardness to his eyes and the set of his mouth that wasn't there at sixteen. It wasn't there at high school graduation either. It grew in him underground, in the dark, frightening places and it grew the first time Bo put a gun in his hand. Raylan remembers that time. It was the night after the cave-in and Raylan had turned in his pink slip but Boyd wouldn't do it.

He told Raylan later, on his way out of town, _my daddy's got a job for us_.

Raylan spat on the ground and turned his back and drove away.

Boyd says, visibly pained, "You ain't dying. But I will answer your question, Raylan. I'll tell you what I want."

"Well, get on with it," Raylan growls. He closes his eyes again, the pain in his chest, that sad burn, rising to meet the pain in his wound. 

He somehow _feels_ Boyd's exasperated smile. It surrounds him like an embrace and Raylan forces his eyes open again. It's too much. 

"Don't do that," he says, not entirely sure if Boyd had actually done anything.

"I wanna show you what you lost, Raylan," he says. "I want you to remember more than the man who died by your hand."

"I do. I do remember. I can't--

Boyd shakes his head like he knows Raylan's thoughts even before he thinks them now. "You forget the details. It makes it easier for you. But I don't want this to be easy. It shouldn't be."

"It wasn't. _Isn't_. Boyd, I _loved_ you. I wanted so many other things for you. But you forced my hand."

"Ambition and an early death." His smile is sad now.

Raylan sneers, growling, "Fuck that. It wasn't no prophecy. It wasn't fate. Bo Crowder never had so much power."

"Maybe not over you."

"You should have let me kill him." Raylan had wanted to do that, badly. Even more than he’d wanted to kill Arlo. He knew where Bo would drag his son. All that talk of legacies and family, built on carrion, sustained by blood. It was a bullet shot thirty years before it hit its mark, put somehow in Raylan's gun. But he knew, he _knew_ it was Bo who pulled the trigger.

"He was my father, Raylan."

"He ruined you."

"I ruined myself when I didn't leave with you. I ruined everything when what you did, what Ava did too, couldn't keep me out of it."

Raylan juts his jaw, his eyes burning. "I know."

"It ain't your fault you couldn't get me out, couldn't make me see."

Raylan can't think about this. His shoulder aches and he'll blame the tears on his face for that. 

And Boyd keeps talking. 

"I could never get at the kind of love you had for me and me for you. I don't think it was the same, but I don't know what kind either was. Maybe I thought--if it really is me doing all this thinking--that going down through the years was gonna let me see it all out in the open, like I might read a map, or a history. But it still ain't like that. It's so foggy and strange and I can know you, Raylan, but I can't touch you. Maybe it's always been like that."

Raylan thinks the opposite for Boyd. He can touch him, but he doesn't ever really know him.

"That's not your fault," Boyd says.

"It always felt like it was."

The words are thick in his mouth and all Boyd's talking, or maybe it's the blood loss finally, is making him lightheaded.

Are there lights across the bridge? Red and blue and red and blue.

"You know I chose, I pushed, I shot all those men, and sold all them drugs," Boyd says. His voice sounds quieter now. "But you don't feel that. You feel like you could have saved me."

"Maybe if I..." Raylan starts to mumble.

"The milk is spilled, Raylan. Spilled and spoiled and maybe we poured it together, but I couldn't bring myself to drink it the way you did."

Raylan frowns. "Did you stop making sense just now?" 

"The metaphor is perhaps a little mixed."

Raylan hears tires rolling fast on gravel--so close--and Boyd in his ear saying, "I want you to feel like you done me no wrong, Raylan. I want you to feel like I loved you too."

Raylan hears them come, quick feet stomping up to him, cool hands at his temple, voices calling his name, but he knows nothing after they touch his arm.

 

He wakes in a hospital.

Winona is sleeping, bent over the rail on his bed, her hand dangling under her crooked elbow where she's resting her head. Boyd is leaning against the wall, near the door.

Raylan looks at him and doesn't speak. He's still nineteen, but his face is clean. He's wearing a white undershirt and a pair of torn jeans. Raylan used to think of him this way, whenever Boyd would cross his mind, before he came back to Harlan and saw him older, and changed again.

"Do you feel it?" Boyd asks.

Raylan thinks, if Boyd knows his mind, he'll know the answer.

"Do you want me to leave now?"

"Maybe don't come around so much," Raylan says, his voice a croak, loud in the stillness of the room. "Maybe don't talk so much."

Boyd rolls his eyes and Raylan thinks of the time Boyd told him, "You want me to shut up, Givens, you come over here and make me," and Raylan couldn't stop thinking about what they'd do if Raylan used his lips to silence him.

Boyd winks, and when Winona stirs, he disappears.

"Were you talking to someone?" she mumbles sleepily, then her eyes widen and she says, "Jesus Christ, Raylan."

He gives her a weak smile and says, "Sorry." He knows it's not enough.

She sits up and looks around confusedly. "Did I miss the nurse?"

He shakes his head. "Think maybe I was dreaming," he tells her.

**Author's Note:**

> I felt like I had to post this before the season premiere. I don't think this is what's going to happen. I live in fear/denial that Boyd's going to die.


End file.
